Without the towers the exterior of the Minster gives me little pleasure, for the Early English chancel and greater and lesser transepts, although imposing and massive, are lacking in proper proportion, and in that deficiency suffer a loss of dignity. The eulogies so many architects and writers have poured out upon the Early English work of this great church, and the strangely adverse comments the same critics have levelled at the Perpendicular additions, do not blind me to what I regard as a most strange misconception on the part of these people. The homogeneity of the central and eastern portions of the Minster is undeniable, but because what appears to be the design of one master-builder of the thirteenth century was apparently carried out in the short period of twenty years, I do not feel obliged to consider the result beautiful. In the Perpendicular work of the western towers everything is in graceful proportion, and nothing from the ground to the top of the turrets, jars with the wonderful dignity of their perfect lines. A few years before the Norman Conquest a central tower and a presbytery were added to the existing building by Archbishop Cynesige. The 'Frenchman's' influence was probably sufficiently felt at that time to give this work the stamp of Norman ideas, and would have shown a marked advance on the Romanesque style of the Saxon age, in which the other portions of the buildings were put up. After that time we are in the dark as to what happened until the year 1188, when a disaster took place of which there is a record: 'In the year from the incarnation of Our Lord 1188, this church was burnt, in the month of September, the night after the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle, and in the year 1197, the sixth of the ides of March, there was an inquisition made for the relics of the blessed John in this place, and these bones were found in the east part of his sepulchre, and reposited; and dust mixed with mortar was found likewise, and re-interred.'